where your votes shape what the world is talking about.

If anyone like me wondered why they would create a tax break in the middle of an extremely resource consuming war, I did a quick Google search and the budget stems from June of 1914 about a week before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The intention was never to create a tax-break, but to have a more unified taxing strategy throughout the empire which unfortunately resulted in a loophole. Apparently the entire thing was some sort of disasters of compromise and surprisingly many reference can be found with Google under the search for '1914 budget fiasco'.

Human sacrifice. I mean it is one thing to do it to enemies and slaves and people you don't like, but to kill people you love because tradition and culture says so seems hard to understand.

If you read about things like widow strangling like it used to be practised on some pacific islands, it just seems unbelievable how for example a loving son could strangle his mother because tradition says so.

sure intellectually you understand that it probably had its roots in necessity at some point, but to keep on doing it when you no longer have to and resources are plenty?

If I am thinking about stuff I would normally talk and write about only in English or something I just read in English I often think about it in English too. For other stuff I would normally use my native language, but It can switch over sometimes.

Based on the fact that the average human angular resolution of the naked eye is about 1' and the moon is about 29' to 34' across and 3,475 km in diameter, a quick back of the envelope calculation says we should be able to make out any structure about 100km in diameter on the moon.

Of course light pollution and how good your eyes are compared to the average person will affect that, as will the position of the structure on the moon. The value I tried to calculate was for the centre of the earthward side of the moon.

Even if you held a knife to the throat of the driver you wouldn't be able to redirect them to crash into the white house or to go to Cuba or some place.

The only thing you could force them to do would be to go faster or slower. Depending on the age and technological sophistication involved you might not even be able to crash the train you have high-jacked because automatic safeties might kick in to avoid accidents and collisions and if the whole thing lasts long enough they can simply turn of the electricity remotely.

By comparison, if you wanted to derail a train, tram or subway and kill everyone inside you would not even need to be on the thing. You could do something like put a bomb on a bridge or in a tunnel.

It would be silly to unnecessarily harass travellers if anyone who wanted to cause trouble could simply attach the rails or the stations instead.

The short term purpose of a manned mission to Mars is to have a manned mission to Mars.

We want to put a man on Mars to be able to say we have put a Man on Mars.

If we just look at the short term gains from that, we won't find many. There is very little that a man might do on Mars that robot might not be also capable of for a fraction of the prize.

Of course in the long term there is always the goal to eventually put a permanent human presence there. A second planet inhabited by humans is a nice thing to have in case anything bad happens to the first one.

We can't currently freeze people and unthaw them alive and we can't currently accelerate a spaceship to relativistic speeds either.

There is also the fact that you didn't specify how far you want to travel.

I tried calculating the time dilation at 99% of c and only got a factor of about 7.

That means internally the time will pass faster but not fast enough to make travelling to stars more distant that a hundred light years or so away viable unless some miracle of life extension or some sort of cryogenic suspended animation was invented.

So to answer your question. For a quick trip to alpha Centauri. freezing the crew would seem unnecessary for any trip more than a 100 parsec away it would seem necessary.

A bit of decline perhaps, mostly do to the rest of the world catching up. The US had its peak during the 20th century when most of the rest of the world was either under-devloped or recovering from one war or another. Not having a war on its home turf unlike Europe and Asia combined with massive amount of resources meant that reaching the top spot wasn't too hard.

Right now everyone is catching up and globalism is smearing out all the advantages and historical inequalities. Still the US can probably coast along from its current position for quite some time before having to worry. If smart people get at the helm 50 years should be doable.

I don't think however that the US will make it to the 22nd century as the worlds top and only superpower.

It depends on where you are from and how old you are, I think. If you are from Europe (excluding perhaps the English speaking parts) and above a certain age you are likely to know Lucky Luke, the man who shoots faster than his shadow, his horse Jolly Jumper, Rantanplan the dumbest dog in the world and the Dalton brothers.

Where I live the character is apparently well known enough that they can do advertisements featuring him and his faster than his own shadow stick without having to explain it. It is assumed that the target audience will just get it.

There is also the fact that Lucky Luke is at his heart a western parody. He didn't invent the aspect of the story, it was already common enough that the comics made fun of it.

The hero, walking the earth, drifting into town as a stranger, doing good deeds, but as soon as their job is done leaving town and riding into the sunset for new adventures before the townfolks have the chance to properly thank them. That is an archetype and should be familiar to anyone even if they have never heard of Lucky Luke.

You know how in movies the down to earth, likeable common sense using all American hero is always the main character and how the realists, by the books intellectuals tend to be side-kicks at best, often obstructionists assholes and villains quite often?

I would be the guy the ruggedly handsome hero tells to "Never tell me my odds".

I would be asshole DA telling the cowboy cop that the suspect would need to let go due to a minor technically like his god-damn rights.

I would be the foolish technologist trying to replace good old fashioned American know how with evil newly-fangled technology like computers when the hero would eventually proove that Ludditism is the way to go.

I would be the heartless bastard telling the hero that we couldn't risk the lives of many to attempt to safe the one person special to them.

I would be the asshole traitor and appeaser who tried to negotiate with the enemy for a peaceful solution, when everyone knows that jingoist war against the mostly unknown enemy is the only way.

At best I would be the comic relief sidekick who does his technology thing, but who completely fails to realize the important stuff like manliness that will save the day.

Electronics appear to be preprogrammed to self-destruct within months after the manufacturers warranty has run out.

Of course some components do have such notices. Hard drives for example come with a MTBF (mean time between failures) in the specs and SMART data you can read from them in theory warns you directly before a failure.

I expect that it would be a lot harder to give similar specs on other devices. Manufacturers will likely give either very low values in order not to overpromise or they will assume completely unrealistic use behaviour to get high values.

Generally a menu driven graphical interface gives you less options than a command line based one. A GUI is easier to use but a command shell can allow for far more variations.

Most people have realized that a good GUI in the end is good enough for most of the things most people need to accomplish, but even Microsoft has gone back to the roots with its powershell, which allows you to do things you can't in the GUI.

Of course some of the same arguments were given when computers started to switch from command-line to gui. Nowadays even the most serious OS come with a GUI by default and nobody feels that you can't do real computer work on something that you operate with a mouse.

Back in my day we had things like supersonic passenger jets and real spaceships that went up into space more than once. And now we don't.

To be fair: Back in my day we didn't have commonly available electric cars, household robots that clean floors for you, pocket sized videophones or real life versions of the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy either and now we have.

Okay, it was funny when it looked like you just got mixed up for a moment and would soon realize your mistake, but now you are trying to double down instead of admitting you are wrong and it just embarrassing.